Woman finds peace amid Eagle Ford Shale's noise

Updated 12:53 am, Tuesday, January 24, 2012

KARNES CITY — I took a trip south last week to visit Peggy Walleck, a country-born girl who's now a gray-haired, blue-sky grandma: 70 and congenitally sweet.

She lived for 36 years on a quiet patch of land. Now she's at the center of a 400-mile opportunity for oil and gas: the Eagle Ford Shale, a vast stretch of underground rock that appears online as a constellation of dots to show the permits spreading across 21 counties and the sprouting, spouting wells themselves.

It's not quiet here anymore. But Walleck is quick to say that's OK.

I spotted her small brick home after passing the rigs rising up from the pasture along FM 99.

Stepping from my car, I instantly heard the noise: a constant, grinding thrum coming from a massive turbine at a facility across the road. It was accompanied by gargantuan green barrels, a gas flare licking the sky and an array of mysterious machinery.

The grinding machine is a gas compressor. The facility separates and stores oil and gas extracted with hydraulic fracturing, a controversial method that blasts water, sand and chemicals deep underground to break up the rock and release the payload.

Walleck knew few details about the site.

“I think they call this a holding plant,” she said. “All I know is the trucks come in and out,” and the compressor grinds “all day, day and night.”

“I don't know what's happening,” she said, adding, “It's really for the good. It really is. It's for the good of everybody.”

Walleck is the sort who accepts incomprehensible change.

Fifty years ago, she and her husband moved onto his parents' farmland. When the land was sold, they moved across the road to raise their kids. Evenings, they'd sit on the front porch and bask in the quiet.

Her husband died recently. Then the boom came, and along with it the noisy operation on the land they once farmed.

Every morning, Walleck runs across the road to collect her mail, warily because the trucks come so fast and so often. Then she picks up the garbage that accumulates every day in her front yard.

For someone so tidy, this is something she doesn't understand: why the truck drivers don't put their trash in a container. It litters the grass all the way into town.

Nights, Walleck uses a white-noise machine to drown out the compressor. One morning, she awoke with a start; her bedcovers were being pulled away, just as her husband once did when he was alive.

She turned on the radio.

“I said, ‘Oh, thank God, that's what it was — we had an earthquake.'”

Walleck drove me along the pipe-lined county roads ringing her old property, now mostly cleared by the oil company to make space for a storage pond and the construction of an underground pipeline.

She drove a relative's pickup because the rocks, torn loose by the trucks, would ruin her car.

“Now it's like a washboard,” she said. “Before it was smooth. I don't know, but it's awful. The county can't keep up with it. But we have to take it.”

Walleck is a born optimist. She has also become a fatalist.

Like others, she notes the economic benefits of drilling in the shale.

Last year, a University of Texas at San Antonio report found the boom supports more than 12,600 jobs and generates tens of millions in state and local government revenues.

Walleck leased her own mineral rights to an oil company five years ago for $300 an acre. The value has since risen to about $5,000 an acre, she said.

But at what cost?

To the South Texas landscape, the cost is fundamental change. Yet as the rigs multiply, moving within weeks to blast their chemicals into one plot of earth to the next, Walleck isn't going anywhere.

“It's home,” she said. “If it wasn't this, it would be something else. I'm happy. It's giving people work, and we needed that in Karnes City.”